spend time your friends, family and the people you trust or care deeply. enjoy your severance money and time off. take a small vacation or break, clear your head the best you can. come back and carefully brush up on your skills. most important, don't give up. layoffs are not a reflection on your skills or performance, it's just corporate politics. you will find a new job, and it will be better than the last. hang in there my friends. move forward and don't look back.
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That's good advise! I used to be in a smaller company, our entire team got cut off, so I worried a lot what to do next, because before that I couldn't find any good place to switch from that small company, where things were going worse and worse.
But surprisingly I got a few offers within a month, I didn't expect that. At that time I choose Cisco, I thought it's big and stable and promising for my career and feature It seems very naive today :)
...I was LR'd in 2016 after 16 years and was back three months to the day... Yes, I had to pay back severance,
Who pulled the strings to get HR to allow you back? I had a manager contact me 3 months after I'd been LR'd wanting to hire me if I was willing and able to come back. I contacted HR who said I could not come back until the 180 black-out period had expired and that paying back the severance package was not an option.
Of course, I would not have agreed to pay back the full severance because I was unemployed for that 3 months due to Cisco's decision, not mine. As it was, the manager hired someone else as a direct hire, then contacted me 9 months later (12 months since I'd been LR'd) and offered me a chance to come back red and flip back to blue at the start of the next fiscal year.
It's not the end folks. I was LR'd in 2016 after 16 years and was back three months to the day after a nice paid vacation. BE PREPARED = don't live paycheck to paycheck! Having money in the bank can alleviate a lot of the immediate stress that comes with getting LR'd. Yes, I had to pay back severance, and the job I came back in for was OK, but I continued to develop and network and leveraged up to a better role after 18 months. It's pretty simple at the end of the day: 1) be effective in your role 2) NETWORK - internally and externally... make sure people know what you can and are doing! 3) rotate jobs every 2-4 years to stay fresh 4) don't settle for a manager... work with a LEADER. I know people who have left CSCO for AMZN, SFDC, VMWare, partners... all companies have their issues. Find a roll that give you fair pay, WLB, and a quality leader to help you on your path.
This is hard if you have no money
spend time your friends, family and the people
Part of the layoff deal was that if you wanted a breakdown by age of the people being laid off, you had to first sign the agreement which protected Cisco from a lawsuit. ... I later found out that they have to give you a breakdown by age of employees who were laid off, regardless of whether you signed any agreement or not.
I'm glad you figured out later that you were lied to. People, if you are being let go as part of a layoff, restructuring, or site closure or other mass action, AND you are age 40 or above, the company IS REQUIRED BY LAW in the U.S. to provide to you a breakdown of people being impacted by age and job title/grade. If they don't give it to you and try to tell you that you have to sign anything to get it, threaten to contact a lawyer. If they won't then they're making your case for age discrimination for you. I was surprised that my "attachment A" that had the details was limited to only my business unit and not Cisco as a whole, but it only made the impact of being over 40 much clearer. My first layoff occurred when Raytheon Systems Co decided to close a site and relocate any engineers who wanted to move to another state. RSC gave ALL employees the attachment with the list of people by age and position regardless of your age, mainly because they were closing a site and it was not about cost, age, race or s-x of the people being let go. Whether or not the impacted people were offered a change to relocate to the new site may have been based on any of those things, but not the layoff itself.
Part of the agreement was that you could not say anything negative about Cisco either verbally or in writing plus you had to agree not to try and recruit anybody from Cisco for 1 year afterwards.
I've not seen that part of the agreement in either of my LR package deals. Yes, I've been LR'd from Cisco twice. I was over 40 both times. And I expect that I'll be LR'd a third time in the future. Good luck enforcing anything about saying anything negative. I don't hate Cisco, or I wouldn't have come back, but there certainly are things about Cisco that I hate. There are things about other companies I've worked at before, between, and after working at Cisco that I hate. I'll say negative things about any and all of my prior employers if asked what I didn't like about them. I can usually find positive things as well, or I wouldn't have accepted employment there, so it's a wash.
@mzc+13EGURCL When I got laid off in 2016, the package was (provided you signed the severance agreement) 12 weeks pay plus for years 10-19, you got an extra week and then for years 20+, you got an additional 2 weeks. I think there was also a lump sum payment equal to 4 months for Cobra payments. Part of the layoff deal was that if you wanted a breakdown by age of the people being laid off, you had to first sign the agreement which protected Cisco from a lawsuit. Part of the agreement was that you could not say anything negative about Cisco either verbally or in writing plus you had to agree not to try and recruit anybody from Cisco for 1 year afterwards. I later found out that they have to give you a breakdown by age of employees who were laid off, regardless of whether you signed any agreement or not. OP, it is very easy to be discouraged if you were 50+ years of age (as I was) when being laid off. The job market for people 50+ years of age is not good.
Anyone else here looking fwd to being on the list for LR? Honestly, I would like a small break before I start my job search. I've had no complaints working for Cisco, obviously YMMV.
My team has less politics comparitivly. Work is decent, pay not great, but WLB is good and was able to give time to family while kids were growing up. If Iam cut, would take it happily without any hard feelings and will always wish well for my coworkers and mgrs.
Just got a “Pulse Engagement Survey” pushed onto me. Not a good sign - something definitely coming.
I love working for Cisco but this fear of layoffs every year is so stressful. There are so many rumors and we are looking for anything to give hope that our name is not on the list. Based on the past, if you are called into a meeting alone it is not a good sign, if your director makes an unannounced visit to the office, not a good sign and if a meeting is scheduled and you are not on the invite list it does not fare well. They also look at length of service to the company and age. The older people with lots of years of tenure generally speaking are the first to go. However with that being said there are people who have worked there for 20+ years and never been hit.
Any idea of what the LR package would include? How many months of pay and is it dependent on how long you've been at Cisco?
thank you
Agree. You know the kind of people that are there now they who have survived layoffs for ~10 yrs its another skill not the competence in work. Not saying of particular breed its not about that, But most now have become immune to having their good working coworker treated horribly and turn the other way so they can feed their family and sometimes make the other one look bad so they can keep their job. Its a different skill set, company is making money off the hard work of the engineers done 10-15 yrs ago and acquisitions , now its just politics money will come in anyway for a few yrs for established product lines. They have to show profitability to the stock holders. You are not at all important in the grand scheme of things.
Well said, I know folks that took package upgrade skills and are in better jobs Uber, Google, etc